Charlie and the Chocolate Factory

Buckets and Gloops and Salts ... OH MY!

In the movie watching marathon that has characterized the summer thus far, Charlie and the Chocolate factory is only the latest. Based by the book of the same name by Roald Dahl ... and NOT a remake of the 1971 Gene Wilder film ... Charlie and the Chocolate Factory is a fanciful tale of pure joy and psychedelic-ness. Both have a distinct feeling of trippiness. I have unfortunately never read the book, but I hope to some day. And, sure, you can expect a review of it!

So, I love Tim Burton. And I love Johnny Depp. As an added bonus, I love Tim Burton and Johnny Depp when they work together. Suffice it to say, I love this film. I love it as much as I love Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. Maybe I even love it more.

It was tons of fun. The most fun I think came at the beginning of the movie when we are meeting the Buckets. Good-hearted Charlie is played very well by little Freddy Highmore who, now has two winning roles alongside Johnny Depp (Finding Neverland being the other of course). Depp is fabulous as always ... and not nearly as creepy as Ebert and Roeper made him out to be. In fact, I think Gene Wilder was a creepier Willy Wonka (please see the scene in the boat ....whoa, scary). And I LOVE Christopher Lee and the Mr. Wonka senior.

I always get a kick out of Burton's visuals. My favorite in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory was the scene where poor Veruca Salt gets her due ... at the paws of squirrels (bad nut, not a bad egg as in the '71 film). Plus there is a really nice gag about whipped cream.

Now lets talk about those Oompa-Loompa's. No longer weirdly orange, they were all played by Deep Roy. I read somewhere that Roy and Burton filmed each Oompa-Loompa in a scene separately using stand-ins who were later removed and replaced with Roy's work. A nice trick and much better than just copying and pasting Roy doing the same thing over and over again. Plus the songs were highly entertaining, especially Augustus Gloop's. I understand that the songs were pulled from Dahl's poems in the book.

Overall, I enjoyed myself immensely. Good fun, good acting, classic Burton. My only regret is not having a big bag o' candy to enjoy while I was watching the film!

Last Words: much fun, I highly recommend it, totally need it for my DVD collection